My Journey of Learning to Use Multi-Media to Teach

Taking this course has taught me a tremendous amount about teaching and learning with multi-media. Prior to becoming a Campus Instructional Technologist, I had been in the classroom for five years and my students, colleagues and peers all regarded me as being pretty technologically savvy when it came to teaching and learning with the utilization of technology- blended and flipped classroom learning. Although I don’t deny those claims, I must admit that I was merely a user of technological resources currently available to the educational field. The things that I've learned in this class, I feel, will transitional me from being a user, to being a producer of technological educational resources.

Thus far, I've learned the proper techniques in developing effective instruction using text, visual, audio, visual-text, audio-visual and video instruction. Developing instruction is by no means an easy venture. Adequate planning is needed to successfully design these multimedia instructional methods and since I had no previous experience with any of the programs that we've used in this course, learning how to properly use Adobe Acrobat, Photoshop, InDesign, Audacity and Premier had been a laborious and time consuming adventure, but it has also been an extremely rewarding one as well.

After learning and maneuvering through a newly learned program to finish an instructional project is one of the greatest feelings of accomplishment that I've ever had. I feel so proud of myself and quickly shared what I learned with my fiancée and other colleagues at work. After each project I am excited to have learned a new program to devise instruction and I quickly turnaround and used what I've learned to train other teachers at my work and even complete projects that are of better quality. For example, after I learned how to use Photoshop, I quickly used it to develop some flyers for my campus’ parent night and PowerUp meetings. Another example is when I learned how to use Premier to edit videos, I quickly recorded the principal of our campus talking about the importance of the one to one initiative that we are currently a prat of and used Premier to edit that video and upload it to YouTube and our school website.

Interestingly, the programs that I've struggled the most to complete instructional projects on are also the ones that I tend to use more now for my profession. I recall redoing the visual instruction project and taking like 15 hours to learn how to properly trace items and manipulate them to suffice the project. I am happy for that though because I feel that much more confident now using Photoshop. Premiere was another program that gave me a bit of trouble as well, but I am very confident using it now.

The easiest instructional design projects I completed for this course were the Text based and Audio based projects. I had a lot of fun recording my instructional steps and playing with the various effects and edit options. I see a lot of potential in this medium and I can’t wait to further explore it. Text was also and easy medium to devise, however, one must pay close attention to the target audience and their learned vernacular. I found it safe to assume that my target audience knew nothing of what I was talking about and defined words specific to the topics nomenclature. I was also as descriptive as possible. Both of these mediums were fun to work with, however, I don’ thing they are the most effective, by themselves, at instructing a particular goal or set of objectives. I believe that title belongs to video instruction.

Video instruction is hands down the best of all multi-media worlds and has the potential to engage and impact a larger audience of learner. Regardless of handicap or learning preference, video instruction covers all multi-media bases and modalities of learning i.e. audio, visual, text. I feel pretty strongly about using all the programs that I've learned in this course thus far. As my profession will have it, I am sure I’ll become more proficient in some versus others, but I am still thankful to have come across and learned how to instruct with multiple media resources.